March is a big time for underwater storms. The combination of melting snow, saturated soils, and rain falling on frozen ground means that the most frequent and most severe floods typically occur in March here in Michigan. These floods may carry 100 or even 1000 times as much water as the stream carries on a dry summer day.
You might deny being part of the Kingdom of Ice – Michigan is more about summer sunshine than it is about ice – but our language betrays us. So does the state s geology.
Published March 22, 2021 at 1:11 PM EDT Listen • 5:02
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John Janssen remembers the moment he realized Lake Michigan was about to change.
It was a September day in 1990 and he was diving looking for sculpin an ugly fish with big lips that likes to hide under rocks.
“I wasn’t paying much attention to anything else it was my dive partner who suddenly grabbed me and pointed out that first zebra mussel,” he says.
“I just lay on the bottom for like five minutes, trying to imagine what the lake was going to look like in a year.”
Janssen is a fisheries biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and he knew what was coming. Zebra mussels had already invaded Lake Erie.
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